


Light Up

by Hokuto



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fire is a silly power for a Nobody, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light Up

**Author's Note:**

> Because the song "Run" by Snow Patrol makes me think of Axel and Roxas so much and I am a sad, sad little person.

"Hey," says Axel, grinning, "watch _this_."

* * *

Fire had to be the most counterintuitive element for a Nobody to have. Ice? Totally cool. Earth, pretty understandable. Shadows, perfect. Water? Eh, it worked. Plants - okay, that one was a stretch, but anyone looking for a heart in Marluxia was barking up an _incredibly_ wrong tree. You didn't need your own heart for lunar divining, just someone else's, and what was more heartless than chance?

A heart is fire, banked or blazing, blue-hot or cooling red. Axel would've been really pissed off at the irony, but the most he could manage was a sort of edgy annoyance that would have made him want to kick puppies, if there had been any in the castle.

Once he lit up a chakram and let it spin behind his head to make a fiery halo, just to impress Roxas. It sort of worked; Roxas was so impressed by how not fireproof Axel's hair was that he laughed the whole time he was cutting off the charred bits.

* * *

He runs for the Dusks and it shouldn't be hard: no pain no gain, no brain no pain, no heart no pain, right? But it's a little hard to leave the guy who's not Roxas behind - _hey, buddy, if you're telling me to come back - louder, louder, I can't hear you..._

* * *

He asked Vexen about it once, but all the snotty jerk would say was that powers were not necessarily related to personality or emotions and didn't Axel have anything better to do, say, perhaps, work? Well, what did Vexen know, anyway, he'd probably been an icicle even before he was a Nobody.

Axel juggled flames and tossed them around and let them curl around his fingers like strands of hair and stood in an inferno's heart, but all that ever caught fire was his head. Roxas told him that the spikes looked good. Spiky-headed solidarity, that's what it was, and Roxas being uncool.

He asked Vexen once if you could have hope without a heart. Vexen looked around at his labwork and files and the little trapped hearts waiting to be sent up with the others, and said, "Define 'hope'."

* * *

Axel skids to a stop in the middle of the Dusks and he can't stop grinning, he should be making a serious hero face but all he can do is smile like a maniac because he has a choice and he has no choice, he could leave not-Roxas behind and try to make it all up to Xemnas and see if he'd take the fuck-up kid back but he _couldn't_ leave not-Roxas behind and this is it, this is the fire he knows he could've had all that time if he'd just realized; it was true, sometimes you didn't know what you had till you were going to lose it.

Well, if he's going to lose he might as well lose it all, and it could've been worse. He could've had nothing to lose. _Only thing that's right in all I've done..._

Axel lights up.


End file.
